Grammar could once seem synonymous with all learning, including magic and astrology; hence French grimoire (book of spells) and English glamour. But as early as the 14th century its OED sense 1.a...
Once, three years ago, I had lunch in Harlem with a crack dealer. The date was set up by an anthropologist who was studying the inner-city drug trade. She promised me that after the three of us...
The two men sitting in the front seats of the Range Rover in an Essex country lane one icy morning last December had no faces. They had been blown away by a hitman. They and their companion, who...
In the days of F.R. Leavis, English literary criticism was wary of overseas, a place saddled with effete, Latinate languages without pith or vigour. Proust is relegated to a lofty footnote in...
I can swim like the others only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten my former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it my ability to swim is of no avail and...
Early in this century, people who read Lytton Strachey, and liked to think of themselves as modern, prided themselves on lacking a sense of Sin. Nowadays people who read Michel Foucault, and who...
‘Bête Noire’ is set in Piccadilly during the long winter between the Battle of Alamein and the Normandy invasion. At the time, the 24-year-old Douglas had pretty much recovered...
I spent the most bizarre night of my life on Hyskeir. If I mention The Birds you will immediately understand.
Twenty years ago I was about to leave the English Department at Columbia University to spend a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton: my project was a biography of J.G. Frazer. At...
The dilemma: it is 1892, you are a 30-year-old female shop assistant in a small silk manufacturing concern in Geneva, the city of your birth. You live with your parents in a modest but pleasant...
Once, the mad were exhibited at Bedlam for the fascination of Sunday tourists; ooh’ed and ahh’ed at as examples of how the human mind can distort the civilised and rational behaviour...
Human beings in different cultures are much more alike, psychologically speaking, than most anthropologists and sociologists suppose. There’s a great deal of substance to the idea of a...
I remember the renegade tears running down the cheeks of my younger sister, who had been among the first boat-loads to arrive in Mombasa. ‘We just escaped,’ she said when I met her in...
Having a baby is such an impediment to American women I used to wonder why they didn’t go on strike: ‘No equality, no kids!’ It may be that something like that is happening in...
Anyone writing a novel about the British intellectual Left, who began by looking around for some exemplary fictional figure to link its various trends and phases, would find themselves...
‘Why is it,’ asks the mathematician John Allen Paulos in his book about the pitfalls of innumeracy, ‘that a lottery ticket with the numbers 2 13 17 20 29 36 is for most people...
‘Are you making a trip here to write a book?’ inquires the manager as Paul Theroux books into a hotel in Corsica, 136 pages into his latest travel narrative. ‘I don’t...
It’s been said more than once by a lot of different people: ‘The problem with Americans is that they have not really started to talk about racism.’ It seems a patently idiotic...